Note on Mobilography
Starting from the concept of mobilography, this parcours approaches the notion of “action camera” as an “interpretative strategy.” In other words, here we will consider moving images in such a way as to underscore the referential shift at work in “an image in which the world acquires its meaning not through reference to what is visible and possibly intelligible, but according to the presence and the condition of what or who is recording.”[1] Over the course of this parcours, we will thus pay particular attention to the body of the filmer, as well as to the “body-camera-space relation” of which the image is the trace.[2] Although the camera obviously remains crucial in this relation, our analysis of the concept of the action camera will stress the connection between the device and the filmer’s body, as well as with the action at the source of the image under discussion.
Rather than categorizing the action camera according to its technical particularities alone, the goal of this parcours is to think about the kind of uses which determine whether a given camera is an action cam or not. By choosing to consider the action camera according to its uses rather than its technical particularities alone, we hope to offer a way of interpreting moving images which would make it possible to include cameras as varied as those manufactured by Pathé, Bolex, Aaton and Éclair. As an overview of uses rather than of particular devices (see also on this topic the parcours Bolex: Cinema's Amateur Horizons, section “Uses”), the purpose of this parcours on the action camera in an encyclopedia of cinematic technologies and techniques lies in the importance of acts and practices in actualizing a technical apparatus in a given context: there is no action camera without the action of the person using it. This parcours thus privileges the harmony between the cameras and the particular uses to which they are put. It is a question, therefore, of providing a series of precise case studies rather than a history of technical developments in a given period.
